Seeing Europe with Famous Authors
by
Francis W. Halsey
Part 1 out of 3
Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Emily Ratliff
and PG Distributed Proofreaders
SEEING EUROPE WITH FAMOUS AUTHORS
Selected And Edited With Introduction, Etc.
By Francis W. Halsey
_Editor of "Great Epochs in American History" Associate Editor of "The
World's Famous Orations" and of "The Best of the World's
Classics," etc._
In Ten Volumes
Illustrated
Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland
Part Two
[_Printed in the United States of America_]
II
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--PART TWO
IV-ENGLISH LITERARY SHRINES--
(_Continued_)
STOKE POGIS--By Charles T. Congdon
HAWORTH--By Theodore F. Wolfe
GAD'S HILL--By Theodore F. Wolfe
RYDAL MOUNT--By William Howitt
TWICKENHAM--By William Howitt
V-OTHER ENGLISH SCENES
STONEHENGE--By Ralph Waldo Emerson
MAGNA CHARTA ISLAND--By Mrs. S. C. Hall
THE HOME OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS--By James M. Hoppin
OXFORD--By Goldwin Smith
CAMBRIDGE--By James M. Hoppin
CHESTER--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE--By Frederick A. Talbot
THE CAPITAL OF THE BRITISH, SAXON AND NORMAN KINGS--By William Howitt
VI--SCOTLAND
EDINBURGH--By Robert Louis Stevenson
HOLYROOD--By David Masson
LINLITHGOW--By Sir Walter Scott
STIRLING--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
ABBOTSFORD--By William Howitt
DRYBURGH ABBEY--By William Howitt
MELROSE ABBEY--By William Howitt
CARLYLE'S BIBTHPLACE AND EARLY HOMES--By John Burroughs
BURNS'S LAND--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
HIGHLAND MARY'S HOME AND GRAVE--By Theodore F. Wolfe
THROUGH THE CALEDONIA CANAL TO INVERNESS--By H. A. Taine
THE SCOTCH HIGHLANDS--By H. A. Taine
BEN LOMOND AND THE HIGHLAND LAKES--By Bayard Taylor
TO THE HEBRIDES--By James Boswell
STAFFA AND IONA--By William Howitt
VII--IRELAND
A SUMMER DAY IN DUBLIN--By William Makepeace Thackeray
DUBLIN CASTLE--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDHAL--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
LIMERICK--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
FROM BELFAST TO DUBLIN--By William Cullen Bryant
THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY--By Bayard Taylor
CORK--by William Makepeace Thackeray
BLARNEY CASTLE--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
MUCROSS ABBEY--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
FROM GLENGARIFF TO KILLARNEY--By William Makepeace Thackeray
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME II
FRONTISPIECE
PRINCESS STREET AND SCOTT'S MONUMENT, EDINBURGH
STRATFORD-ON-AVON
INTERIOR OF TRINITY CHURCH, STRATFORD
ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE, NEAR STRATFORD
ROOM IN STRATFORD IN WHICH SHAKESPEARE WAS BORN
NEWSTEAD ABBEY, BYRON'S ANCESTRAL HOME
STOKE POGIS, THE SCENE OF GRAY'S "ELEGY"
OXFORD
EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE
ST. MARTIN'S CHURCH, CANTERBURY
EDINBURGH CASTLE AND NATIONAL GALLERY
OLD GREYFRIAR'S CHURCH, EDINBURGH
HOLYROOD PALACE, EDINBURGH
STIRLING CASTLE
RUINS OF HOLYROOD ABBEY, EDINBURGH
MELROSE ABBEY
GLASTONBURY ABBEY
CRAIGMILLAR CASTLE, SCOTLAND
DUMBARTON ROCK AND CASTLE
LIMERICK CASTLE
ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL, DUBLIN
THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY
BLARNEY CASTLE
MUCROSS ABBEY
THE LAKES OF KILLARNEY
SACKVILLE STREET, DUBLIN
THE GAP OF DUNLOE
IV
ENGLISH LITERARY SHRINES
(_Continued_)
STOKE POGIS [Footnote: From "Reminiscences of a Journalist." By special
arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton,
Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1884. Mr. Congdon was, for many years, under
Horace Greeley, a leading editorial writer for the New York "Tribune."]
BY CHARLES T. CONGDON
It was a comfort as I came out of the Albert Memorial Chapel, and
rejoined nature upon the Terrace, to mutter to myself those fine lines
which not a hundred years ago everybody knew by heart: "The boast of
heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth ere
gave, Await alike th' inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to
the grave,"--a verse which I found it not bad to remember as in the
Chapel Royal I gazed upon the helmets, and banners, and insignia of many
a defunct Knight of the Garter. I wondered if posterity would care much
for George the Fourth, or Third, or Second, or First, whose portraits I
had just been gazing at; I was sure that a good many would remember the
recluse scholar of Pembroke Hall, the Cambridge Professor of Modern
History, who cared for nothing but ancient history; who projected twenty
great poems, and finished only one or two; who spent his life in
commenting upon Plato and studying botany, and in writing letters to his
friend Mason; and who with a real touch of Pindar in his nature, was
content to fiddle-faddle away his life. He died at last of a most
unpoetical gout in the stomach, leaving behind him a cartload of
memoranda, and fifty fragments of fine things; and yet I, a stranger
from a far distant shore, was about to make a little pilgrimage to his
tomb, and all for the sake of that "Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard," which has so held its own while a hundred bulkier things
have been forgotten.
The church itself is an interesting but not remarkable edifice, old,
small, and solidly built in a style common enough in England. Nothing,
however, could be more in keeping with the associations of the scene.
The very humility of the edifice has a property of its own, for anything
more magnificent would jar upon the feelings, as the monument in the
Park does most decidedly. It was Gray's wish that he might be buried
here, near the mother whom he loved so well; otherwise he could hardly
have escaped the posthumous misfortune of a tomb in Westminster Abbey or
St. Paul's. In such case the world would have missed one of the most
charming of associations, and the great poem the most poetical of its
features. For surely it was fit that he who sang so touchingly of the
dead here sleeping, should find near them his last resting-place; that
when the pleasant toil in libraries was over, the last folio closed by
those industrious hands, the last manuscript collated, and the last
flower picked for the herbarium, he who here so tenderly sang of the
emptiness of earthly honors and the nothingness of worldly success should
be buried humbly near those whom he best loved, and where all the moral
of his teaching might be perpetually illustrated. I wondered, as I stood
there, whether Horace Walpole ever thought it worth his while, for the
sake of that early friendship which was so rudely broken, to come there,
away from the haunts of fashion, or from his plaything villa at
Strawberry Hill, to muse for a moment over the grave of one who rated
pedigrees and peerages at their just value. Probably my Lord Orford was
never guilty of such a piece of sentimentality. He was thinking too much
of his pictures and coins and eternal bric-a-brac for that.
A stone set in the outside of the church indicates the spot near which
the poet is buried. I was very anxious to see the interior of the
edifice, and, fortunately I found the sexton busy in the neighborhood.
There was nothing, however, remarkable to be seen, after sixpence had
opened the door, except perhaps the very largest pew which these eyes
ever beheld. It belonged to the Penn family, descendants of drab-coated
and sweet-voiced William Penn, whose seat is in the neighborhood. I do
not know what that primitive Quaker would have said to such an enormous
reservation of space in the house of God for the sole use and behoof of
two or three aristocratic worshipers. Probably few of my readers have
ever seen such a pew as that. It was not so much a pew as a room. It was
literally walled off, and quite set apart from the plebeian portion of
the sanctuary, was carpeted, and finished with comfortable arm-chairs,
and in the middle of it was a stove. The occupants could look out and
over at the altar, but the rustics could not look in and at them. The
Squire might have smoked or read novels, or my lady might have worked
worsted or petted her poodle through the service, without much scandal.
The pew monopolized so much room that there was little left for the
remainder of the "miserable offenders," but I suspect that there was
quite enough for all who came to pray. For it was, as I have said,
literally a country church; and those who sleep near it were peasants.
It is difficult to comprehend the whole physiognomy of the poem, if I
may use the expression, without seeing the spot which it commemorates. I
take it for granted that the reader is familiar with it. There are
"those rugged elms," and there is "that yew tree's shade." There are
"the frail memorials," "with uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture
decked;" there "the name, the years, spelt by the unlettered muse;" and
the holy texts strewn round "that teach the rustic moralist to die."
There is still "the ivy-mantled tower," tho the "moping owl" that
evening did not "to the moon complain," partly because there was no moon
to complain to, and possibly because there was no moping owl in the
tower. But there was one little circumstance which I may be pardoned for
mentioning. Gray, somehow, has the reputation of being an artificial
poet, yet for one who wrote so little poetry he makes a good many
allusions to childhood and children. As I passed through the Park on my
way to the churchyard, I encountered a group of merry boys and girls
playing about the base of the monument; and I recalled that verse which
Gray wrote for the Elegy, and afterward discarded, under the impression
that it made the parenthesis too long.
There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.
I have often wondered how Gray could bear to give up these sweet, tender
and most natural lines. I have sometimes surmised that he thought them a
little too much like Ambrose Philips's verses about children--Namby
Pamby Philips, as the Pope set nicknamed that unfortunate writer.
I lingered about the churchyard until that long twilight, of which we
know nothing in America, began to grow dimmer and dimmer. If it was
still before, it seemed all the stiller now. I was glad that I had
waited so long, because by doing so I understood all the better how true
the Elegy is to nature. The neighborhood, with its agreeable variety of
meadow and wood, has all the hundred charms of the gentle and winning
English scenery. The hush, hardly broken even by the songs of the birds,
brought forcibly to my mind that beautiful line of the Elegy: "And all
the air a solemn stillness holds;" while that other line: "Now fades the
glimmering landscape on the sight," is exactly true. The landscape did
glimmer, and as I watched the sun go down, I pleased myself with the
fancy that I was sitting just where the poet sat, as he revolved those
lines which the world has got by heart. Just then came the cry of the
cattle, and I knew why Gray wrote: "The lowing herd winds slowly o'er
the lea," nor did I fail to encounter a plowman homeward plodding his
weary way.
As I strolled listlessly back to the station, there was such a serenity
on the earth about me, and in the sky above me, that I could easily give
myself to gentle memories and poetic dreams. I recalled the springtime
of life, when I learned this famous Elegy by heart as a pleasant task,
and, as yet unsophisticated by critical notions, accepted it as perfect.
I thought of innumerable things which I had read about it; of the long
and patient revision which its author gave it, year after year, keeping
it in his desk, and then sending it, a mere pamphlet, with no flourish
of trumpets, into the world. Many an ancient figure came to lend
animation to the scene. Horace Walpole in his lace coat and spruce wig
went mincing by; the mother of Gray, with her sister, measured lace for
the customers who came to her little shop in London; the wags of
Pembroke College, graceless varlets, raise an alarm of fire that they
may see the frightened poet drop from the window, half dead with alarm;
old Foulis, the Glasgow printer, volunteers to send from his press such,
a luxurious edition of Gray's poems as the London printers can not
match; Dr. Johnson, holding the page to his eyes, growls over this
stanza, and half-grudgingly praises that. I had spent perhaps the
pleasantest day which the fates vouchsafed me during my sojourn in
England; and here I was back again in Slough Station, ready to return to
the noisy haunts of men. The train came rattling up, and the day with
Gray was over.
HAWORTH [Footnote: From "A Literary Pilgrimage." By arrangement with,
and by permission of, the publishers, J. B. Lippincott Co.
Copyright, 1895.]
BY THEODORE F. WOLFE
Other Bronte shrines have engaged us,--Guiseley, where Patrick Bronte
was married and Neilson worked as a mill-girl; the lowly Thornton home,
where Charlotte was born; the cottage where she visited Harriet
Martineau; the school where she found Caroline Helstone and Rose and
Jessy Yorke; the Fieldhead, Lowood, and Thornfield of her tales; the
Villette where she knew her hero; but it is the bleak Haworth hilltop
where the Brontes wrote the wonderful books and lived the pathetic lives
that most attracts and longest holds our steps. Our way is along
Airedale, now a highway of toil and trade, desolated by the need of
hungry poverty and greed of hungrier wealth; meads are replaced by
blocks of grimy huts, groves are supplanted by factory chimneys that
assoil earth and heaven, the one "shining" stream is filthy with the
refuse of many mills.
At Keighley our walk begins, and altho we have no peas in our "Pilgrim
shoon," the way is heavy with memories of the sad sisters Bronte who so
often trod the dreary miles which bring us to Haworth. The village
street, steep as a roof, has a pavement of rude stones, upon which the
wooden shoes of the villagers clank with an unfamiliar sound. The dingy
houses of gray stone, barren and ugly in architecture, are huddled along
the incline and encroach upon the narrow street. The place and its
situation are a proverb of ugliness in all the countryside; one dweller
in Airedale told us that late in the evening of the last day of creation
it was found that a little rubbish was left, and out of that Haworth was
made. But, grim and rough as it is, the genius of a little woman has
made the place illustrious and draws to it visitors from every quarter
of the world. We are come in the "glory season" of the moors, and as we
climb through the village we behold above and beyond it vast undulating
sweeps of amethyst-tinted hills rising circle beyond circle,--all now
one great expanse of purple bloom stirred by zephyrs which waft to us
the perfume of the heather.
At the hilltop we come to the Black Bull Inn, where one Bronte drowned
his genius in drink, and from our apartment here we look upon all the
shrines we seek. The inn stands at the churchyard gates, and is one of
the landmarks of the place. Long ago preacher Grimshaw flogged the
loungers from its taproom into chapel; here Wesley and Whitefield lodged
when holding meetings on the hilltop; here Bronte's predecessor took
refuge from his riotous parishioners, finally escaping through the low
easement at the back,--out of which poor Branwell Bronte used to vault
when his sisters asked for him at the door. This inn is a quaint
structure, low-eaved and cosy; its furniture is dark with age. We sleep
in a bed once occupied by Henry J. Raymond, [Footnote: In the editorial
sense, the founder of the New York "Times." Mr. Raymond died in 1869,
eighteen years after the paper was started.] and so lofty that steps are
provided to ascend its heights. Our meals are served in the
old-fashioned parlor to which Branwell came. In a nook between the
fireplace and the before-mentioned easement stood the tall arm-chair,
with square seat and quaintly carved back, which was reserved for him.
The landlady denied that he was summoned to entertain travelers here;
"he never needed to be sent for, he came fast enough of himself." His
wit and conviviality were usually the life of the circle, but at times
he was mute and abstracted and for hours together "would just sit and
sit in his corner there." She described him as a "little, red-haired,
light-complexioned chap, cleverer than all his sisters put together.
What they put in their books they got from him," quoth she, reminding us
of the statement in Grundy's Reminiscences that Branwell declared he
invented the plot and wrote the major part of "Wuthering Heights."
Certain it is he possest transcending genius and that in this room that
genius was slain. Here he received the message of renunciation from his
depraved mistress which finally wrecked his life; the landlady, entering
after the messenger had gone, found him in a fit on the floor. Emily
Bronte's rescue of her dog, an incident recorded in "Shirley," occurred
at the inn door.
The graveyard is so thickly sown with blackened tombstones that there is
scant space for blade or foliage to relieve its dreariness, and the
villagers, for whom the yard is a thoroughfare, step from tomb to tomb;
in the time of the Brontes the village women dried their linen on these
graves. Close to the wall which divides the churchyard from the vicarage
is a plain stone set by Charlotte Bronte to mark the grave of Tabby, the
faithful servant who served the Brontes from their childhood till all
but Charlotte were dead. The very ancient church-tower still "rises dark
from the stony enclosure of its yard;" the church itself has been
remodeled and much of its romantic interest destroyed. No interments
have been made in the vaults beneath the aisles since Mr. Bronte was
laid there. The site of the Bronte pew is by the chancel; here Emily sat
in the farther corner, Anne next and Charlotte by the door, within a
foot of the spot where her ashes now lie.
A former sacristan remembered to have seen Thackeray and Miss Martineau
sitting with Charlotte in the pew. And here, almost directly above her
sepulcher, she stood one summer morning and gave herself in marriage to
the man who served for her as "faithfully and long as did Jacob for
Rachel." The Bronte tablet in the wall bears a uniquely pathetic record,
its twelve lines registering eight deaths, of which Mr. Bronte's at the
age of eighty-five, is the last. On a side aisle is a beautiful stained
window inscribed "To the Glory of God, in Memory of Charlotte Bronte, by
an American citizen." The list shows that most of the visitors come from
America, and it was left for a dweller in that far land to set up here
almost the only voluntary memento of England's great novelist. A worn
page of the register displays the tremulous autograph of Charlotte as
she signs her maiden name for the last time, and the signatures of the
witnesses to her marriage,--Miss Wooler, of "Roe Head," Ellen Nussy, who
is the E of Charlotte's letters and the Caroline of "Shirley."
The vicarage and its garden are out of a corner of the churchyard and
separated from it by a low wall. A lane lies along one side of the
churchyard and leads from the street to the vicarage gates. The garden,
which was Emily's care, where she tended stunted shrubs and borders of
unresponsive flowers and where Charlotte planted the currant-bushes, is
beautiful with foliage and flowers, and its boundary wall is overtopped
by a screen of trees which shuts out the depressing prospect of the
graves from the vicarage windows and makes the place seem less "a
churchyard home" than when the Brontes inhabited it. The dwelling is of
gray stone, two stories high, of plain and somber aspect. A wing is
added, the little window-panes are replaced by larger squares, the stone
floors are removed or concealed, curtains--forbidden by Mr. Bronte's
dread of fire--shade the window, and the once bare interior is furbished
and furnished in modern style; but the arrangement of the apartments is
unchanged.
Most interesting of these is the Bronte parlor, at the left of the
entrance; here the three curates of "Shirley" used to take tea with Mr.
Bronte and were upbraided by Charlotte for their intolerance; here the
sisters discuss their plots and read each other's MSS.; here they
transmuted the sorrows of their lives into the stories which make the
name of Bronte immortal; here Emily, "her imagination occupied with
Wuthering Heights," watched in the darkness to admit Branwell coming
late and drunken from the Black Bull; here Charlotte, the survivor of
all, paced the night-watches in solitary anguish, haunted by the
vanished faces, the voices forever stilled, the echoing footsteps that
came no more. Here, too, she lay in her coffin. The room behind the
parlor was fitted by Charlotte for Nichols's study. On the right was
Bronte's study, and behind it the kitchen, where the sisters read with
their books propt on the table before them while they worked, and where
Emily (prototype of "Shirley"), bitten by a dog at the gate of the lane,
took one of Tabby's glowing irons from the fire and cauterized the
wound, telling no one till danger was past.
Above the parlor is the chamber in which Charlotte and Emily died, the
scene of Nichols's loving ministrations to his suffering wife. Above
Bronte's study was his chamber; the adjoining children's study was later
Branwell's apartment and the theater of the most terrible tragedies of
the stricken family; here that ill-fated youth writhed in the horrors of
mania-a-potu; here Emily rescued him--stricken with drunken stupor--from
his burning couch, as "Jane Eyre" saved Rochester; here he breathed out
his blighted life erect upon his feet, his pockets filled with
love-letters from the perfidious woman who brought his ruin. Even now
the isolated site of the parsonage, its environment of graves and
wild-moors, its exposure to the fierce winds of the long winters, make
it unspeakably dreary; in the Brontes' time it must have been cheerless
indeed. Its influence darkened the lives of the inmates and left its
fateful impression upon the books here produced. Visitors are rarely
admitted to the vicarage; among those against whom its doors have been
closed is the gifted daughter of Charlotte's literary idol, to whom
"Jane Eyre" was dedicated, Thackeray.
By the vicarage lane were the cottage of Tabby's sister, the school the
Brontes daily visited, and the sexton's dwelling where the curates
lodged. Behind the vicarage a savage expanse of gorse and heather rises
to the horizon and stretches many miles away; a path oft-trodden by the
Brontes leads between low walls from their home to this open moor, their
habitual resort in childhood and womanhood. The higher plateaus afford a
wide prospect, but, despite the August bloom and fragrance and the
delightful play of light and shadow along the sinuous sweeps, the aspect
of the bleak, treeless, houseless waste of uplands is even now
dispiriting; when frosts have destroyed its verdure, and wintry skies
frown above, its gloom and desolation must be terrible beyond
description. Remembering that the sisters found even these usually
dismal moors a welcome relief from their tomb of a dwelling, we may
appreciate the utter dreariness of their situation and the pathos of
Charlotte's declaration, "I always dislike to leave Haworth, it takes so
long to be content again after I return."
GAD'S HILL [Footnote: From "A Literary Pilgrimage." By arrangement with,
and by permission of, the publishers, J. B. Lippincott Co.
Copyright, 1895.]
BY THEODORE F. WOLFE
"To go to Gad's Hill," said Dickens, in a note of invitation, "you leave
Charing Cross at nine o'clock by North Kent Railway for Higham." Guided
by these directions and equipped with a letter from Dickens's son, we
find ourselves gliding eastward among the chimneys of London and, a
little later, emerging into the fields of Kent,--Jingle's region of
"apples, cherries, hops, and women." The Thames is on our left; we pass
many river-towns,--Dartford where Wat Tyler lived, Gravesend where
Pocahontas died,--but most of our way is through the open country, where
we have glimpses of "fields," "parks," and leafy lanes, with here and
there picturesque camps of gypsies or of peripatetic rascals "goin'
a-hoppin.'" From wretched Higham a walk of half an hour among orchards
and between hedges of wild-rose and honeysuckle brings us to the hill
which Shakespeare and Dickens have made classic ground, and soon we see,
above the tree tops, the glittering vane which surmounted the home of
the world's greatest novelist.
The name Gad's (Vagabond's) Hill is a survival of the time when the
depredations of highwaymen upon "pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich
offerings and traders riding to London with fat purses" gave to this
spot the ill repute it had in Shakespeare's day; it was here he located
Falstaff's great exploit. The tuft of evergreens which crowns the hill
about Dickens' retreat is the remnant of thick woods once closely
bordering the highway, in which the "men in buckram" lay concealed, and
the robbery of the Franklin was committed in front of the spot where the
Dickens house stands. By this road passed Chaucer, who had property near
by, gathering from the pilgrims his "Canterbury Tales." In all time to
come the great master of romance who came here to live and die will be
worthily associated with Shakespeare and Chaucer in the renown of
Gad's Hill.
In becoming possessor of this place Dickens realized a dream of his
boyhood and ambition of his life. In one of his travelers' sketches he
introduces a "queer small boy" (himself) gazing at Gad's Hill House and
predicting his future ownership, which the author finds annoying
"because it happens to be my house and I believe what he said was true."
When at last the place was for sale, Dickens did not wait to examine it;
he never was inside the house until he went to direct its repair.
Eighteen hundred pounds was the price; a thousand more were expended for
enlargement of the grounds and alterations of the house, which, despite
his declaration that he had "stuck bits upon it in all manner of ways,"
did not greatly change it from what it was when it became the goal of
his childish aspirations. At first it was his summer residence
merely,--his wife came with him the first summer,--but three years later
he sold Tavistock House, and Gad's Hill was thenceforth his home. From
the bustle and din of the city he returned to the haunts of his boyhood
to find restful quiet and time for leisurely work among these "blessed
woods and fields" which had ever held his heart. For nine years after
the death of Dickens Gad's Hill was occupied by his oldest son; its
ownership has since twice or thrice changed.
Its elevated site and commanding view render it one of the most
conspicuous, as it is one of the most lovely, spots in Kent. The mansion
is an unpretentious, old-fashioned, two-storied structure of fourteen
rooms. Its brick walls are surmounted by Mansard roofs above which rises
a bell-turret; a pillared portico, where Dickens sat with his family on
summer evenings, shades the front entrance; wide bay-windows project
upon either side; flowers and vines clamber upon the walls, and a
delightfully home-like air pervades the place. It seems withal a modest
seat for one who left half a million dollars at his death. At the right
of the entrance-hall we see Dickens's library and study, a cosy room
shown in the picture of "The Empty Chair;" here are shelves which held
his books; the panels he decorated with counterfeit bookbacks; the nook
where perched, the mounted remains of his raven, the "Grip" of "Barnaby
Rudge." By this bay-window, whence he could look across the lawn to the
cedars beyond the highway, stood his chair and the desk where he wrote
many of the works by which the world will know him always. Behind the
study was his billiard-room, and upon the opposite side of the hall the
parlor, with the dining-room adjoining it at the back, both bedecked
with the many mirrors which delighted the master.
Opening out of these rooms is a conservatory, paid for out of "the
golden shower from America" and completed but a few days before Dickens'
death, holding yet the ferns he tended. The dining-room was the scene of
much of that emphatic hospitality which it pleased the novelist to
dispense, his exuberant spirits making him the leader in all the jollity
and conviviality of the board. Here he compounded for bibulous guests
his famous "cider-cup of Gad's Hill," and at the same table he was
stricken with death; on a couch beneath yonder window, the one nearest
the hall, he died on the anniversary of the railway accident which so
frightfully imperiled his life. From this window we look out upon a lawn
decked with shrubbery and see across undulating cornfields his beloved
Cobham. From the parqueted hall, stairs lead to the modest
chambers--that of Dickens being above the drawing-room. He lined the
stairway with prints of Hogarth's works, and declared he never came down
the stairs without pausing to wonder at the sagacity and skill which had
produced these masterful pictures of human life.
The house is invested with roses, and parterres of the red geraniums
which the master loved are ranged upon every side. It was some fresh
manifestation of his passion for these flowers that elicited from his
daughter the averment, "Papa, I think when you are an angel your wings
will be made of looking-glasses and your crown of scarlet geraniums."
Beneath a rose-tree not far from the window where Dickens died, a bed
blooming with blue lobelia holds the tiny grave of "Dick" and the tender
memorial of the novelist to that "Best of Birds." The row of gleaming
limes which shadow the porch was planted by Dickens's own hands. The
pedestal of the sundial upon the lawn is a massive balustrade of the old
stone bridge at nearby Rochester, which little David Copperfield crossed
"footsore and weary" on his way to his aunt, and from which Pickwick
contemplated the castle-ruin, the cathedral, the peaceful Medway. At the
left of the mansion are the carriage-house and the school-room of
Dickens' sons. In another portion of the grounds are his tennis-court
and the bowling-green which he prepared, where he became a skilful and
tireless player. The broad meadow beyond the lawn was a later purchase,
and the many limes which beautify it were rooted by Dickens. Here
numerous cricket-matches were played, and he would watch the players or
keep the score "The whole day long."
It was in this meadow that he rehearsed his readings, and his talking,
laughing, weeping, and gesticulating here "all to himself" excited among
his neighbors suspicion of his insanity. From the front lawn a tunnel
constructed by Dickens passes beneath the highway to "The Wilderness," a
thickly-wooded shrubbery, where magnificent cedars up-rear their
venerable forms and many somber firs, survivors of the forest which erst
covered the countryside, cluster upon the hill top. Here Dickens's
favorite dog, the "Linda" of his letters, lies buried. Amid the leafy
seclusion of this retreat, and upon the very spot where Falstaff was
routed by Hal and Poins ("the eleven men in buckram"), Dickens erected
the chalet sent to him in pieces by Fechter, the upper room of which--up
among the quivering boughs, where "birds and butterflies fly in and out,
and green branches shoot in at the windows"--Dickens lined with mirrors
and used as his study in summer. Of the work produced at Gad's Hill--"A
Tale of Two Cities," "The Uncommercial Traveler," "Our Mutual Friend,"
"The Mystery of Edwin Drood," and many tales and sketches of "All the
Year Round"--much was written in this leaf-environed nook; here the
master wrought through the golden hours of his last day of conscious
life, here he wrote his last paragraph and at the close of that June day
let fall his pen, never to take it up again. From the place of the
chalet we behold the view which delighted the heart of Dickens--his desk
was so placed that his eyes would rest upon this view whenever he raised
them from his work--the fields of waving corn, the green expanse of
meadows, the sail-dotted river.
RYDAL MOUNT [Footnote: From "Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent
British Poets."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT
As you advance a mile or more on the road from Ambleside toward
Grasmere, a lane overhung with trees turns up to the right, and there,
at some few hundred yards from the highway, stands the modest cottage of
the poet, elevated on Rydal Mount, so as to look out over the
surrounding sea of foliage, and to take in a glorious view. Before it,
at some distance across the valley, stretches a high screen of bold and
picturesque mountains; behind, it is overtowered by a precipitous hill,
called Nab-scar; but to the left, you look down over the broad waters of
Windermere, and to the right over the still and more embosomed flood
of Grasmere.
Whichever way the poet pleases to advance from his house, it must be
into scenery of that beauty of mountain, stream, wood, and lake, which
has made Cumberland so famous over all England. He may steal away up
backward from his gate and ascend into the solitary hills, or diverging
into the grounds of Lady Mary Fleming, his near neighbor, may traverse
the deep shades of the woodland, wander along the banks of the rocky
rivulet, and finally stand before the well known waterfall there. If he
descend into the highway, objects of beauty still present themselves.
Cottages and quiet houses here and there glance from their little spots
of Paradise, through the richest boughs of trees; Windermere, with its
wide expanse of waters, its fairy islands, its noble hills, allures his
steps in one direction; while the sweet little lake of Rydal, with its
heronry and its fine background of rocks, invites him in another.
In this direction the vale of Grasmere, the scene of his early married
life, opens before him, and Dunmail-raise and Langdale-pikes lift their
naked corky summits, as hailing him to the pleasures of old
companionship. Into no quarter of this region of lakes, and mountains,
and vales of primitive life, can he penetrate without coming upon ground
celebrated by his muse. He is truly "sole king of rocky Cumberland."
The immediate grounds in which his house stands are worthy of the
country and the man. It is, as its name implies, a mount. Before the
house opens a considerable platform, and around and beneath lie various
terraces and descend various walks, winding on amid a profusion of trees
and luxuriant evergreens. Beyond the house, you ascend various terraces,
planted with trees now completely overshadowing them; and these terraces
conduct you to a level above the house-top, and extend your view of the
enchanting scenery on all sides.
Above you tower the rocks and precipitous slopes of Nab-scar; and below
you, embosomed in its trees, lies the richly ornate villa of Mr. William
Ball, a friend, whose family and the poet's are on such social terms,
that a little gate between their premises opens both to each family
alike. This cottage and grounds were formerly the property of Charles
Lloyd, also a friend, and one of the Bristol and Stowey coterie. Both he
and Lovell have been long dead; Lovell, indeed, was drowned, on a voyage
to Ireland, in the very heyday of the dreams of Pantisocracy, in which
he was an eager participant.
The poet's house, itself, is a proper poet's abode. It is at once
modest, plain, yet tasteful and elegant. An ordinary dining-room, a
breakfast-room in the center, and a library beyond, form the chief
apartments. There are a few pictures and busts, especially those of
Scott and himself, a good engraving of Burns, and the like, with a good
collection of books, few of them very modern.
TWICKENHAM [Footnote: From "Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British
Poets."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT
It seems that Pope did not purchase the freehold of the house and
grounds at Twickenham, but only a long lease. He took his father and
mother along with him. His father died there the year after, but his
mother continued to live till 1733, when she died at the great age of
ninety-three. For twenty years she had the singular satisfaction of
seeing her son the first poet of his age; carest by the greatest men of
the time, courted by princes, and feared by all the base. No parents
ever found a more tender and dutiful son. With him they shared in honor
the ease and distinction he had acquired. They were the cherished
objects of his home. Swift paid him no false compliment when he said, in
condoling with him on his mother's death, "You are the most dutiful son
I have ever known or heard of, which is a felicity not happening to one
in a million."
The property at Twickenham is properly described by Roscoe as lying on
both sides of the highway, rendering it necessary for him to cross the
road to arrive at the higher and more ornamental part of his gardens. In
order to obviate this inconvenience, he had recourse to the expedient of
excavating a passage under the road from one part of his grounds to the
other, a fact to which he alludes in these lines:
"Know all the toil the heavy world can heap,
Rolls o'er my grotto, nor disturbs my sleep."
The lower part of these grounds, in which his house stood, constituted,
in fact, only the sloping bank of the river, by much the smaller portion
of his territory. The passage, therefore, was very necessary to that far
greater part, which was his wilderness, shrubbery, forest, and every
thing, where he chiefly planted and worked. This passage he formed into
a grotto, having a front of rude stonework opposite to the river and
decorated within with spars, ores, and shells. Of this place he has
himself left this description:
"I have put the last hand to my works of this kind, in happily finishing
the subterranean way and grotto. I found there a spring of the clearest
water, which falls in a perpetual rill, that echoes through the cavern
night and day. From the River Thames you see through my arch, up a walk
of the wilderness, to a kind of open temple wholly composed of shells in
the rustic manner; and from that distance under the temple you look down
through a sleeping arcade of trees, and see the sails on the river
passing suddenly and vanishing, as through a perspective glass. When you
shut the door of this grotto, it becomes, on the instant, from a
luminous room, a camera obscura, on the walls of which all the objects
of the river, hills, woods, and boats are forming a moving picture, in
their visible radiations; and when you have a mind to light it less, it
affords you a very different scene. It is finished with shells,
interspersed with looking-glass in regular forms, and in the ceiling is
a star of the same material, at which, when a lamp of an orbicular
figure of thin alabaster is hung in the middle, a thousand pointed rays
glitter, and are reflected over the place. There are connected to this
grotto, by a narrow passage, two porches, one toward the river, of
smooth stones full of light and open; the other toward the garden,
shadowed with trees, rough with shells, flints, and iron ore. The bottom
is paved with simple pebbles, as is also the adjoining walk up the
wilderness to the temple, in the natural state, agreeing not ill with
the little dripping murmur, and the aquatic idea of the whole place. It
wants nothing to complete it but a good statue with an inscription, like
that beautiful antique one which you know I am so fond of. You will
think I have been very poetical in this description; but it is pretty
near the truth."
But it was not merely in forming this grotto that Pope employed himself;
it was in building and extending his house, which was in a Roman style,
with columns, arcades, and porticos. The designs and elevations of these
buildings may be seen by his own hand in the British Museum, drawn in
his usual way on backs of letters. The following passage, in a letter to
Mr. Digby, will be sufficient to give us his idea of both his Thamesward
garden and his house in a summer view: "No ideas you could form in the
winter could make you imagine what Twickenham is in this warm summer.
Our river glitters beneath the unclouded sun, at the same time that its
banks retain the verdure of showers; our gardens are offering their
first nosegays; our trees, like new acquaintance brought happily
together, are stretching their arms to meet each other, and growing
nearer and nearer every hour. The birds are paying their thanksgiving
songs for the new habitations I have made them. My building rises high
enough to attract the eye and curiosity of the passenger from the river,
where, upon beholding a mixture of beauty and ruin, he inquires, 'What
house is falling, or what church is arising?' So little taste have our
common Tritons for Vitruvius; whatever delight the poetical gods of the
river may take in reflecting on their streams, my Tuscan porticos, or
Ionic pilasters."
Pope's architecture, like his poetry, has been the subject of much and
vehement dispute. On the one hand, his grottos and his buildings have
been vituperated as most tasteless and childish; on the other, applauded
as beautiful and romantic. Into neither of these disputes need we enter.
In both poetry and architecture a bolder spirit and a better taste have
prevailed since Pope's time. With all his foibles and defects, Pope was
a great poet of the critical and didactic kind, and his house and place
had their peculiar beauties. He was himself half inclined to suspect the
correctness of his fancy in such matters, and often rallies himself on
his gimcracks and crotchets in both verse and prose....
Pope's building madness, however, had method in it. Unlike the great
romancer and builder of our time, [Footnote: Sir Walter Scott] he never
allowed such things to bring him into debt. He kept his mind at ease by
such prudence, and soothed and animated it under circumstances of
continued evil by working among his trees, and grottos, and vines, and
at his labors of poetry and translations. At the period succeeding the
rebellion of 1715, when that event had implicated and scattered so many
of his highest and most powerful friends, here he was laboring away at
his "Homer" with a progress which astonished every one. Removed at once
from the dissipations and distractions of London, and from the agreeable
interruptions of such society, he found leisure and health enough here
to give him vigor for exertions astonishing for so weak a frame. The
tastes he indulged here, if they were not faultless according to our
notions, were healthy, and they endured. To the end of his life he
preserved his strong attachment to his house and grounds.
V
OTHER ENGLISH SCENES
STONEHENGE [Footnote: From "English Traits." Published by Houghton,
Mifflin Co. Emerson's second visit to England, during which he saw
Stonehenge, was made in 1847. Of all the Druidical remains in Europe,
Stonehenge is perhaps the most remarkable, altho at Carnac in Brittany
on the northern shore of the Bay of Biscay, are Druidical remains more
numerous, but in general they are smaller and less suggestive of
constructive design.]
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
We left the train at Salisbury, and took a carriage to Amesbury, passing
by Old Sarum, a bare, treeless hill, once containing the town which sent
two members to Parliament--now, not a hut--and, arriving at Amesbury, we
stopt at the George Inn. After dinner we walked to Salisbury Plain. On
the broad downs, under the gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing
but Stonehenge, which looked like a group of brown dwarfs in the wide
expanse--Stonehenge and the barrows, which rose like green bosses about
the plain, and a few hay ricks. On the top of a mountain the old temple
would not be more impressive. Far and wide a few shepherds with their
flocks sprinkled the plain, and a bagman drove along the road. It looked
as if the wide margin given in this crowded isle to this primeval temple
were accorded by the veneration of the British race to the old egg out
of which all their ecclesiastical structures and history had proceeded.
Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a diameter of a hundred feet,
and enclosing a second and third colonnade within. We walked round the
stones, and clambered over them, to wont ourselves with their strange
aspect and groupings, and found a nook sheltered from the wind among
them, where C. [Footnote: Thomas Carlyle, the author of "Sartor
Resartus," etc., etc.] lighted his cigar. It was pleasant to see that
just this simplest of all simple structures--two upright stones and a
lintel laid across--had long outstood all later churches, and all
history, and were like what is most permanent on the face of the planet:
these, and the barrows--(mere mounds of which there are a hundred and
sixty within a circle of three miles about Stonehenge)--like the same
mound on the plain of Troy, which still makes good to the passing
mariner on Hellespont, the vaunt of Homer and the fame of Achilles.
Within the enclosure grow buttercups, nettles, and, all around, wild
thyme, daisy, meadowsweet, goldenrod, thistle, and the carpeting grass.
Over us, larks were soaring and singing--as my friend said: "the larks
which were hatched last year, and the wind which was hatched many
thousand years ago." We counted and measured by paces the biggest
stones, and soon knew as much as any man can suddenly know of the
inscrutable temple. There are ninety-four stones, and there were once
probably one hundred and sixty. The temple is circular and uncovered,
and the situation fixt astronomically--the grand entrances here, and at
Abury, being placed exactly northeast, "as all the gates of the old
cavern temples are." How came the stones here, for these sarsens or
Druidical sandstones are not found in this neighborhood? The sacrificial
stone, as it is called, is the only one in all these blocks that can
resist the action of fire, and, as I read in the books, must have been
brought one hundred and fifty miles.
On almost every stone we found the marks of the mineralogist's hammer
and chisel. The nineteen smaller stones of the inner circle are of
granite. I, who had just come from Professor Sedgwick's Cambridge Museum
of megatheria and mastodons, was ready to maintain that some cleverer
elephants or mylodonta had borne off and laid these rocks one on
another. Only the good beasts must have known how to cut a well-wrought
tenon and mortise, and to smooth the surface of some of the stones. The
chief mystery is, that any mystery should have been allowed to settle on
so remarkable a monument, in a country on which all the muses have kept
their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We are not yet too late to
learn much more than is known of this structure. Some diligent Fellowes
or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole history, by that
exhaustive British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice of
objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to the rabbits,
while it opens pyramids, and uncovers Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of
the simplicity of its plan, and its good preservation, is as if new and
recent; and, a thousand years hence, men will thank this age for the
accurate history it will yet eliminate.
MAGNA CHARTA ISLAND [Footnote: From "Pilgrimages to English Shrines."
Magna Charta Island lies in the Thames, a few miles below Windsor.]
BY MRS. S. C. HALL.
The Company of Basket-makers (if there be such a company) have claimed a
large portion of the field--where the barons, "clad in complete steel,"
assembled to confer with King John upon the great charter of English
freedom, by which, Hume truly but coldly says, "very important
liabilities and privileges were either granted or secured to every order
of men in the kingdom; to the clergy, to the barons, and to the
people"--the Basket-makers, we say, have availed themselves of the low
land of Runnymead to cultivate osiers; piles and stacks of "withies" in
various stages of utility, for several hundred yards shut out the river
from the wayfarer, but as he proceeds they disappear, and Cooper's Hill
on the left, the rich flat of Runnymead, the Thames, and the groves of
time-honored Anckerwycke, on its opposite bank, form together a rich and
most interesting picture.
It is now nearly a hundred years since it was first proposed to erect a
triumphal column upon Runnymead; but we have sometimes a strange
antipathy to do what would seem avoidable; the monument to the memory of
Hampden is a sore proof of the niggardliness of liberals to the liberal;
but all monuments to such a man or to such a cause must appear poor; the
names "Hampden" and "Runnymead" suffice; the green and verdant mead,
encircled by the coronet of Cooper's Hill, reposing beneath the sun, and
shadowed by the passing cloud, is an object of reverence and beauty,
immortalized by the glorious liberty which the bold barons of England
forced from a spiritless tyrant.
Tho Cooper's Hill has no claim to the sublimity of mountain scenery, its
peculiar situation commands a broad expanse of country. It rises
abruptly from the Runnymead meadows, and extends its long ridge in a
northwesterly direction; the summit is approached by a winding road,
which from different points of the ascent progressively unfolds a
gorgeous number of fertile views, such as no other country in the
world can give.
"Of hills and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires,
And glittering towns, and silver streams."
We have heard that the views from Kingswood Lodge--the dwelling of the
hill--are delicious, and that its conservatory contains an exquisite
marble statue of "Hope." On the west of Cooper's Hill is the interesting
estate of Anckerwycke Purnish. Anckerwycke has been for a series of
years in the possession of the family of Harcourt. There is a "meet" of
the three shires in this vicinity--Surrey, Buckinghamshire, and
Berkshire. The views from the grounds of Anekerwycke are said to be of
exceeding beauty, and the kindness of its master makes eloquent the poor
about his domain. All these things, and the sound of the rippling waters
of the Thames, and the songs of the myriad birds which congregate in its
groves, and the legends sprung of its antiquity, all contribute to the
adornment of the gigantic fact that here, King John, sorely against his
will, signed Magna Charta! How that single fact fills the soul, and
nerves the spirit; how proudly the British birthright throbs within our
bosoms. We long to lead the new Napoleon, the absolute Nicholas, the
frank, hospitable, and brave, but sometimes overconfident American, to
this green sward of Runnymead and tell them that here was secured to the
Englishman a liberty which other nations have never enjoyed! Here in the
thickset beauty of yon little island, was our Charter granted.
There has been much dispute as to whether the Charter was signed upon
the Mead or on the island called "Magna Charta Island," which forms a
charming feature in the landscape, and upon which is built a little sort
of altar-house, so to call it. We leave the settlement of such matters
to wiser and more learned heads; but we incline to the idea that John
would have felt even the mimic ferry a protection. The island looks even
now exclusive, and as we were impelled to its shore, we indulged the
belief that the charter was really there signed by the king.
There was a poetic feeling in whoever planted the bank of
"Forget-me-not" just at the entrance to the low apartment which was
fitted up to contain the charter stone, by the late Simon Harcourt,
Esq., in the year 1835. The inscription on the stone is as follows:--"Be
it remembered, that on this island, in June, 1215, John, King of
England, Signed the Magna Charta, and in the year 1834, this building
was erected in commemoration of that great and important event by George
Simon Harcourt, Esq., Lord of the Manor and then High Sheriff of the
county." A gentleman rents the island from Mr. Harcourt, and has built
there a Gothic cottage in excellent keeping with the place. It adjoins
the altar-room, but does not interfere with it, nor with the privileges
so graciously bestowed on the public by Mr. Harcourt--permitting
patriots or fishermen to visit the island, and picnic in a tent prepared
for the purpose, under the shelter of some superb walnut trees.
THE HOME OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS [Footnote: From "Old England: Its
Scenery, Art and People." Published Toy Houghton, Mifflin Co.]
BY JAMES M. HOPPIN.
Twelve miles to the south of Doncaster, on the great Northern line of
railway, and just at the junction of Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and
Lincolnshire, in the county of Nottingham, but bordering upon the fenny
districts of Lincolnshire, whose monotonous scenery reminds one of
Holland, lies the village of Scrooby. Surely it is of more interest to
us than all the Pictish forts and Roman walls that the "Laird of
Monkbarns" ever dreamed of. I was dropt out of the railway-carriage,
which hardly stopt upon a wide plain at a miniature station-house, with
some suspicions of a church and small village across the flat rushy
fields in the distance. This was indeed the humble village (tho now
beginning to be better known) which I had been searching for; and which
nobody of whom I inquired in Doncaster, or on the line of the railway,
seemed to know anything about, or even that such a place existed. I made
its discovery by the help of a good map. The station-master said he came
to Scrooby in 1851, and then it numbered three hundred inhabitants; and
since that time there had been but twelve deaths.
My search for the manor-house where Brewster and Bradford established
the first church of the Pilgrims, was, for a time, entirely fruitless. I
inquired of a genuine "Hodge" working in the fields; but his round red
face showed no glimmer of light on the matter so far removed from beans
and barley. I next encountered a good Wesleyan minister, trudging his
morning circuit of pastoral visitation, but could gain nothing from him,
tho a chatty, communicative man. At the venerable stone church of
Scrooby, very rude and plain in architecture, but by no means devoid of
picturesqueness, I was equally unsuccessful. The verger of the church,
who is generally the learned man of the village, was absent; and his
daughter knew nothing outside the church and churchyard.
I strolled along the grassy country road that ran through the place till
I met a white-haired old countryman, who proved to be the most
intelligent soul in the neighborhood. He put his cane to his chin, shut
and opened his eyes, and at last told me in broad Yorkshire, that he
thought the place I was looking for must be what they called "the
bishop's house," where Squire Dickinson lived. Set at last upon the
right track, I walked across two swampy meadows that bordered the Idle
River--pertinently named--till I came to a solitary farmhouse with a
red-tiled roof. Some five or six slender poplar-trees stood at the back
of it, and a ditch of water at one end, where there had been evidently
an ancient moat--"a moated grange."
It was a desolate spot, and was rendered more so just then by the coming
up of a thunder-storm, whose "avant courier," the wind, made the slender
poplars and osiers bend and twist. Squire John Dickinson, the present
inhabitant of the house, which is owned by Richard Monckton Milnes, the
poet, gave me a hearty farmer's welcome. I think he said there had been
one other American there before; at any rate he had an inkling that he
was squatted on soil of some peculiar interest to Americans. He
introduced me to his wife and daughters, healthy and rosy-cheeked
English women, and made me sit down to a hospitable luncheon. He
entertained me with a discourse upon the great amount of hard work to be
done in farming among these bogs, and wished he had never undertaken it,
but had gone to America or Australia. The house, he said, was rickety
enough, but he contrived to make it do. It was, he thought, principally
made of what was once a part of the stable of the Manor House.
The palace itself has now entirely disappeared; "but," said my host,
"dig anywhere around here and you will find the ruins of the old
palace." Dickinson said that he himself was reared in Austerfield, a few
miles off in Yorkshire; and that a branch of the Bradford family still
lived there. After luncheon I was shown Cardinal Wolsey's mulberry-tree,
or what remained of it; and in one of the barns, some elaborately carved
woodwork and ornamental beams, covered with dirt and cobwebs, were
pointed out, which undoubtedly belonged to the archiepiscopal palace.
This was all that remained of the house where Elder Brewster once lived,
and gathered his humble friends about him, in a simple form of
worship.... This manor was assigned to the Archbishop of York in the
"Doomsday Book." Cardinal Wolsey, when he held that office, passed some
time at this palace. While he lived there, Henry VIII. slept a night in
the house. It came into Archbishop Sandys's hands in 1576. He gave it by
lease to his son, Samuel Sandys, under whom Brewster held the manor.
Brewster, as is now well known, was the Post-Superintendent of Scrooby,
an important position in those days, lying as the village did, and does
now, upon the great northern line of travel from London to Yorkshire,
Northumberland, and Scotland....
But to look at this lonely and decayed manor-house, standing in the
midst of these flat and desolate marshes, and at this most obscure
village of the land, this Nazareth of England, slumbering in rustic
ignorance and stupid apathy, and to think of what has come out of this
place, of what vast influences and activities have issued from this
quiet and almost listless scene, one has strange feelings. The storied
"Alba Longa," from which Rome sprang, is an interesting spot, but the
newly discovered spiritual birthplace of America may excite
deeper emotions.
OXFORD [Footnote: From "Oxford and Her Colleges." By arrangement with
the publishers, Macmillan Co. Copyright, 1893.]
BY GOLDWIN SMITH
There is in Oxford much that is not as old as it looks. The buildings of
the Bodleian Library, University College, Oriel, Exeter, and some
others, medieval or half medieval in their style, are Stuart in date. In
Oxford the Middle Ages lingered long. Yon cupola of Christ Church is the
work of Wren, yon towers of All Souls' are the work of a still later
hand. The Headington stone, quickly growing black and crumbling, gives
the buildings a false hue of antiquity. An American visitor, misled by
the blackness of University College, remarked to his host that the
buildings must be immensely old. "No," replied his host, "their color
deceives you; their age is not more than two hundred years." It need not
be said that Palladian edifices like Queen's, or the new buildings of
Magdalen, are not the work of a Chaplain of Edward III., or a Chancellor
of Henry VI. But of the University buildings, St. Mary's Church and the
Divinity School, of the College buildings, the old quadrangles of
Merton, New College, Magdalen, Brasenose, and detached pieces not a few
are genuine Gothic of the Founders' age.
Here are six centuries, if you choose to include the Norman castle, here
are eight centuries, and, if you choose to include certain Saxon
remnants in Christ Church Cathedral, here are ten centuries, chronicled
in stone. Of the corporate lives of these Colleges, the threads have run
unbroken through all the changes and revolutions, political, religious,
and social, between the Barons' War and the present hour. The economist
goes to their muniment rooms for the record of domestic management and
expenditure during those ages.
Till yesterday, the codes of statutes embodying their domestic law, tho
largely obsolete, remained unchanged. Nowhere else in England, at all
events, unless it be at the sister University, can the eye and mind feed
upon so much antiquity, certainly not upon so much antique beauty, as on
the spot where we stand. That all does not belong to the same remote
antiquity, adds to the interest and to the charm. This great home of
learning, with its many architectures, has been handed from generation
to generation, each generation making its own improvements, impressing
its own tastes, embodying its own tendencies, down to the present hour.
It is like a great family mansion, which owner after owner has enlarged
or improved to meet his own needs or tastes, and which, thus chronicling
successive phases of social and domestic life, is wanting in uniformity
but not in living interest or beauty.
Oxford is a federation of Colleges. It had been strictly so for two
centuries, and every student had been required to be a member of a
college when, in 1856, non-collegiate students, of whom there are now a
good many, were admitted. The University is the federal government. The
Chancellor, its nominal head, is a non-resident grandee, usually a
political leader whom the University delights to honor and whose
protection it desires. Only on great state occasions does he appear in
his gown richly embroidered with gold. The acting chief is the
Vice-Chancellor, one of the heads of Colleges, who marches with the
Bedel carrying the mace before him, and has been sometimes taken by
strangers for the attendant of the Bedel. With him are the two Proctors,
denoted by their velvet sleeves, named by the Colleges in turn, the
guardians of University discipline.
The University Legislature consists of three houses--an elective
Council, made up equally of heads of Colleges, professors, and Masters
of Arts; the Congregation of residents, mostly teachers of the
University or Colleges; and the Convocation, which consists of all
Masters of Arts, resident or non-resident, if they are present to vote.
Congregation numbers 400, Convocation nearly 6,000. Legislation is
initiated by the Council, and has to make its way through Convocation
and Congregation, with some chance of being wrecked between the
academical Congregation, which is progressive, and the rural
Convocation, which is conservative. The University regulates the general
studies, holds all the examinations, except that at entrance, which is
held by the Colleges, confers all the degrees and honors, and furnishes
the police of the academical city. Its professors form the general and
superior staff of teachers. Each College, at the same time, is a little
polity in itself. It has its own governing body, consisting of a Head
(President, Master, Principal, Provost, or Warden) and a body of
Fellows. It holds its own estates; noble estates, some of them are. It
has its private staff of teachers or tutors, usually taken from the
Fellows, tho the subjects of teaching are those recognized by the
University examinations....
The buildings of the University lie mainly in the center of the city
around us. There is the Convocation House, the hall of the University
Legislature, where, in times of collision between theological parties,
or between the party of the ancient system of education and that of the
modern system, lively debates have been heard. In it, also, are
conferred the ordinary degrees. They are still conferred in the
religious form of words, handed down from the Middle Ages, the candidate
kneeling down before the Vice-Chancellor in the posture of medieval
homage. Oxford is the classic ground of old forms and ceremonies. Before
each degree is conferred, the Proctors march up and down the House to
give any objector to the degree--an unsatisfied creditor, for
example--the opportunity of entering a caveat by "plucking" the
Proctor's sleeve. Adjoining the Convocation House is the Divinity
School, the only building of the University, saving St. Mary's Church,
which dates from the Middle Ages. A very beautiful relic of the Middle
Ages it is when seen from the gardens of Exeter College. Here are held
the examinations for degrees in theology, styled, in Oxford of old,
queen of the sciences, and long their tyrant. Here, again, is the
Sheldonian Theater, the gift of Archbishop Sheldon, a Primate of the
Restoration period, and as readers of Pepys's "Diary" know, of
Restoration character, but a patron of learning....
The Clarendon was built with the proceeds of the history written by the
Minister of the early Restoration, who was Chancellor of the University,
and whose touching letter of farewell to her, on his fall and flight
from England, may be seen in the Bodleian Library. There, also, are
preserved documents which may help to explain his fall. They are the
written dialogs which passed between him and his master at the board of
the Privy Council, and they show that Clarendon, having been the
political tutor of Charles the exile, too much bore himself as the
political tutor of Charles the king. In the Clarendon are the University
Council Chamber and the Registry. Once it was the University press, but
the press has now a far larger mansion yonder to the northwest, whence,
besides works of learning and science, go forth Bibles and prayer-books
in all languages to all quarters of the globe. Legally, as a printer of
Bibles the University has a privilege, but its real privilege is that
which it secures for itself by the most scrupulous accuracy and by
infinitesimal profits.
Close by is the University Library, the Bodleian, one of those great
libraries of the world in which you can ring up at a few minutes' notice
almost any author of any age or country. This Library is one of those
entitled by law to a copy of every book printed in the United Kingdom,
and it is bound to preserve all that it receives, a duty which might in
the end burst any building, were it not that the paper of many modern
books is happily perishable.... We stand in the Radcliffe, formerly the
medical and physical library, now a supplement and an additional
reading-room of the Bodleian, the gift of Dr. Radcliffe, Court Physician
and despot of the profession in the times of William and Anne, of whose
rough sayings, and sayings more than rough, some are preserved in his
"Life." He it was who told William III. that he would not have His
Majesty's two legs for his three kingdoms, and who is said to have
punished the giver of a niggardly fee by a prediction of death, which
was fulfilled by the terrors of the patient. Close at hand is the
Ashmolean, the old University Museum, now only a museum of antiquities,
the most precious of which is King Alfred's gem. Museum and Medical
Library have together migrated to the new edifice on the north side
of the city.
But of all the University buildings the most beautiful is St. Mary's
Church, where the University sermons are preached, and from the pulpit
of which, in the course of successive generations and successive
controversies, a changeful and often heady current of theology has
flowered. There preached Newman, Pusey, and Manning; there preached
Hampden, Stanley, and the authors of "Essays and Reviews." ...
On the north of the city, where fifty years ago stretched green fields,
is now seen a suburb of villas, all of them bespeaking comfort and
elegance, few of them overweening wealth. These are largely the
monuments of another great change, the removal of the rule of celibacy
from the Fellowships, and the introduction of a large body of married
teachers devoted to their profession, as well as of the revival of the
Professorships, which were always tenable by married men. Fifty years
ago the wives of Heads of Houses, who generally married late in life if
they married at all, constituted, with one or two officers of the
University, the whole female society of Oxford. The change was
inevitable, if education was to be made a profession, instead of being,
as it had been in the hands of celibate Fellows of Colleges, merely the
transitory occupation of a man whose final destination was the parish.
Those who remember the old Common Room life, which is now departing, can
not help looking back with a wistful eye to its bachelor ease, its
pleasant companionship, its interesting talk and free interchange of
thought, its potations neither "deep" nor "dull."
Nor were its symposia without important fruits when such men as Newman
and Ward, on one side, encountered such men as Whateley, Arnold, and
Tait, on the other side in Common Room talk over great questions of the
day. But the life became dreary when a man had passed forty, and it is
well exchanged for the community that fills those villas, and which,
with its culture, its moderate and tolerably equal incomes, permitting
hospitality but forbidding luxury, and its unity of interests with its
diversity of acquirements and accomplishments, seems to present the
ideal conditions of a pleasant social life. The only question is, how
the College system will be maintained when the Fellows are no longer
resident within the walls of the College to temper and control the
younger members, for a barrack of undergraduates is not a good thing.
The personal bond and intercourse between Tutor and pupil under the
College system was valuable as well as pleasant; it can not be resigned
without regret. But its loss will be compensated by far
superior teaching.
CAMBRIDGE [Footnote: From "Old England: Its Scenery, Art and People."
Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co.]
BY JAMES M. HOPPIN.
I was struck with the positive resemblances between Oxford and
Cambridge. Both are situated on slightly rising ground, with broad green
meadows and a flat, fenny country stretching around them. The winding
and muddy Cam, holding the city in its arm, might be easily taken for
the fond but still more capricious Isis, tho both of them are
insignificant streams; and Jesus' College Green and Midsummer Common at
Cambridge, correspond to Christ Church Meadows and those bordering the
Cherwell at Oxford. At a little distance, the profile of Cambridge is
almost precisely like that of Oxford, while glorious King's College
Chapel makes up all deficiencies in the architectural features and
outline of Cambridge.
Starting from Bull Inn, we will not linger long in the streets, tho we
might be tempted to do so by the luxurious book-shops, but will make
straight for the gateway of Trinity College. This gateway is itself a
venerable and imposing structure, altho a mass of houses clustered about
it destroys its unity with the rest of the college buildings. Between
its two heavy battlemented towers are a statue of Edward III. and his
coat-of-arms; and over the gate Sir Isaac Newton had his observatory.
This gateway introduces into a noble court, called the Great Court, with
a carved stone fountain or canopied well in the center, and buildings of
irregular sizes and different ages inclosing it. The chapel which forms
the northern side of this court dates back to 1564. In the ante-chapel,
or vestibule, stands the statue of Sir Isaac Newton, by Roubiliac. It is
spirited, but, like all the works of this artist, unnaturally
attenuated. The head is compact rather than large, and the forehead
square rather than high. The face has an expression of abstract
contemplation, and is looking up, as if the mind were just fastening
upon the beautiful law of light which is suggested by the hand holding a
prism. By the door of the screen entering into the chapel proper, are
the sitting statues of Sir Francis Bacon and Dr. Isaac Barrow, two more
giants of this college. The former represents the philosopher in a
sitting posture, wearing his high-crowned hat, and leaning thoughtfully
upon his hand.
The hall of Trinity College, which separates the Great Court from the
Inner or Neville Court, (courts in Cambridge, quads in Oxford), is the
glory of the college. Its interior is upward of one hundred feet in
length, oak-wainscoted, with deep beam-work ceiling, now black with age,
and an enormous fireplace, which in winter still blazes with its old
hospitable glow. At the upper end where the professors and fellows sit,
hang the portraits of Bacon and Newton. I had the honor of dining in
this most glorious of banqueting-halls, at the invitation of a fellow of
the college. Before meals, the ancient Latin, grace, somewhat
abbreviated, is pronounced.
We pass through the hall into Neville Court, three sides of which are
cloistered, and in the eastern end of which stands the fine library
building, built through the exertions of Dr. Barrow, who was determined
that nothing in Oxford should surpass his own darling college.
The library room is nearly two hundred feet long, with tesselated marble
floor, and with the busts of the great men of Trinity ranged around the
walls. The wood-carvings of Grinling Gibbons that adorn this room, of
flowers, fruit, wheat, grasshoppers, birds, are of singular beauty, and
make the hard oak fairly blossom and live. This library contains the
most complete collection of the various editions of Shakespeare's Works
which exists. Thorwaldsen's statue of Byron, who was a student of this
college, stands at the south end of the room. It represents him in the
bloom of youth, attired as a pilgrim, with pencil in hand and a broken
Grecian column at his feet....
The next neighbor to Trinity on the north, and the next in point of size
and importance in the University, is St. John's College. It has four
courts, one opening into the other. It also is jealously surrounded by
high walls, and its entrance is by a ponderous old tower, having a
statue of St. John the Evangelist over the gateway. Through a covered
bridge, not unlike "the Bridge of Sighs," one passes over the stream to
a group of modern majestic castellated buildings of yellow stone
belonging to this college. The grounds, walks, and thick groves
connected with this building form an elegant academic shade, and tempt
to a life of exclusive study and scholarly accumulation, of growing fat
in learning, without perhaps growing muscular in the effort to
use it....
King's College, founded by Henry VII., from whom it takes its name,
comes next in order. Its wealthy founder, who, like his son, loved
architectural pomp, had great designs in regard to this institution,
which were cut off by his death, but the massive unfinished gateway of
the old building stands as a regal specimen of what the whole plan would
have been had it been carried out. Henry VIII., however, perfected some
of his father's designs on a scale of true magnificence. King's College
Chapel, the glory of Cambridge and England, is in the perpendicular
style of English Gothic. It is three hundred and sixteen feet long,
eighty-four feet broad, its sides ninety feet, and its tower one hundred
and forty-six feet high. Its lofty interior stone roof in the
fan-tracery form of groined ceiling has the appearance of being composed
of immense white scallop-shells, with heavy corbels of rich flowers and
bunches of grapes suspended at their points of junction. The ornamental
emblem of the Tudor rose and portcullis is carved in every conceivable
spot and nook. Twenty-four stately and richly painted windows, divided
into the strong vertical lines of the Perpendicular style, and crossed
at right angles by lighter transoms and more delicate circular moldings,
with the great east and west windows flashing in the most vivid and
superb colors, make it a gorgeous vision of light and glory....
On the same street, and nearly opposite St. Peter's, is Pembroke
College, a most interesting and venerable pile, with a quaint gable
front. Its buildings are small, and it is said, for some greatly needed
city improvement, will probably be soon torn down; on hearing which, I
thought, would that some genius like Aladdin's, or some angel who bore
through the air the chapel of the "Lady of Loretto," might bear these
old buildings bodily to our land and set them down on the Yale grounds,
so that we might exchange their picturesque antiquity for the present
college buildings, which, tho endeared to us by many associations, are
like a row of respectable brick factories.
Edmund Spenser and William Pitt belonged to Pembroke; and Gray, the
poet, driven from St. Peter's by the pranks and persecutions of his
fellow students, spent the remainder of his university life here. Some
of the cruel, practical jokes inflicted upon the timid and delicate
nature sound like the modern days of "hazing freshmen." Among his other
fancies and fears, Gray was known to be especially afraid of fire, and
kept always coiled up in his room a rope-ladder, in case of emergency.
By a preconcerted signal, on a dark winter night, a tremendous cry of
fire was raised in the court below, which caused the young poet to leap
out of bed and to hastily descend his rope-ladder into a mighty tub of
ice-cold water, set for that purpose....
Sidney Sussex and Imanuel Colleges were called by Archbishop Laud "the
nurseries of Puritanism." The college-book of Sidney Sussex contains
this record: "Oliver Cromwell of Huntingdon was admitted as an associate
on the 26th day of April, 1616. Tutor Richard Howlet." He had just
completed his seventeenth year. Cromwell's father dying the next year,
and leaving but a small estate, the young "Protector" was obliged to
leave college for more practical pursuits. "But some Latin," Bishop
Burnett said, "stuck to him." An oriel window looking upon Bridge
Street, is pointed out as marking his room; and in the master's lodge is
a likeness of Cromwell in his later years, said to be the best extant.
The gray hair is parted in the middle of the forehead, and hangs down
long upon the shoulders, like that of Milton. The forehead is high and
swelling, with a deep line sunk between the eyes. The eyes are gray. The
complexion is florid and mottled, and all the features rugged and large.
Heavy, corrugated furrows of decision and resolute will are plowed about
the mouth, and the lips are shut like a vice. Otherwise, the face has a
calm and benevolent look, not unlike that of Benjamin Franklin.
In Sidney Sussex, Cromwell's College, and in two or three other colleges
of Cambridge University, we find the head-sources of English Puritanism,
which, in its best form, was no wild and unenlightened enthusiasm, but
the product of thoughtful and educated minds. We shall come soon upon
the name of Milton. John Robinson, our national father, and the Moses of
our national exodus, as well as Elder Brewster, John Cotton and many
others of the principal Puritan leaders and divines, were educated at
Cambridge. Sir Henry Vane, the younger, whom Macintosh regarded as not
inferior to Bacon in depth of intellect, and to whom Milton addrest the
sonnet, who was chosen Governor of Massachusetts, and who infused much
of his own thoughtful and profound spirit into Puritan institutions at
home and in America, was a student of Magdalen College, Oxford.
A little further on to the south of Sidney Sussex, upon St. Andrew's
Street, is Christ's College. The front and gate are old; the other
buildings are after a design by Inigo Jones. In the garden stands the
famous mulberry-tree said to have been planted by Milton. It is still
vigorous, tho carefully propt up and mounded around, and its aged trunk
is sheathed with lead. The martyr Latimer, John Howe, the prince of
theological writers, and Archdeacon Paley, belonged to this college; but
its most brilliant name is that of John Milton. He entered in 1624; took
the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1628, and that of Master of Arts in
1632. This is the entry in the college record: "John Milton of London,
son of John Milton, was entered as a student in the elements of letters
under Master Hill of the Pauline School, February 12, 1624...." Milton
has indignantly defended himself against the slander of his political
enemies, that he left college in disgrace, and calls it "a
commodious lie." ...
It is noticeable that Cambridge has produced all the great poets;
Oxford, with her yearnings and strivings, none. Milton were glory
enough; but Spenser, Gray, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson (a
Lincolnshire man), may be thrown in. It might be said of Cambridge, as
Dr. Johnson said of Pembroke College, "We are a nest of singing birds
here." Milton, from the extreme elegance of his person and his mind,
rather than from any effeminateness of character, was called while in
the University, "the lady of Christ's College." The young poet could not
have been inspired by outward Nature in his own room; for the miniature
dormer-windows are too high to look out of at all. It is a small attic
chamber, with very steep narrow stairs leading up to it. The name of
"Milton" (so it is said to be, tho hard to make out) is cut in the old
oaken door.
CHESTER [Footnote: From "English Note-Books." By special arrangement
with, and by permission of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co.
Copyright, 1870-1898.]
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
I went with Mr. Ticknor to Chester by railway. It is quite an
indescribable old town, and I feel as if I had had a glimpse of old
England. The wall encloses a large space within the town, but there are
numerous houses and streets not included within its precincts. Some of
the principal streets pass under the ancient gateways; and at the side
there are flights of steps, giving access to the summit. Around the top
of the whole wall, a circuit of about two miles, there runs a walk, well
paved with flagstones, and broad enough for three persons to walk
abreast....
The most utterly indescribable feature of Chester is the Rows, which
every traveler has attempted to describe. At the height of several feet
above some of the oldest streets, a walk runs through the front of the
houses, which project over it. Back of the walk there are shops; on the
outer side is a space of two or three yards, where the shopmen place
their tables, and stands, and show-cases; overhead, just high enough for
persons to stand erect, a ceiling. At frequent intervals little narrow
passages go winding in among the houses, which all along are closely
conjoined, and seem to have no access or exit, except through the shops,
or into these narrow passages, where you can touch each side with your
elbows, and the top with your hand. We penetrated into one or two of
them, and they smelt anciently and disagreeably.
At one of the doors stood a pale-looking, but cheerful and good-natured
woman, who told us that she had come to that house when first married,
21 years before, and had lived there ever since; and that she felt as if
she had been buried through the best years of her life. She allowed us
to peep into her kitchen and parlor--small, dingy, dismal, but yet not
wholly destitute of a home look. She said she had seen two or three
coffins in a day, during cholera times, carried out of that narrow
passage into which her door opened. These avenues put me in mind of
those which run through ant-hills, or those which a mole makes
underground. This fashion of Rows does not appear to be going out; and,
for aught I can see, it may last hundreds of years longer. When a house
becomes so old as to be untenantable, it is rebuilt, and the new one is
fashioned like the old, so far as regards the walk running through its
front. Many of the shops are very good, and even elegant, and these Rows
are the favorite places of business in Chester. Indeed, they have many
advantages, the passengers being sheltered from the rain, and there
being within the shops that dimmer light by which tradesmen like to
exhibit their wares.
A large proportion of the edifices in the Rows must be comparatively
modern; but there are some very ancient ones, with oaken frames visible
on the exterior. The Row, passing through these houses, is railed with
oak, so old that it has turned black, and grown to be as hard as stone,
which it might be mistaken for, if one did not see where names and
initials have been cut into it with knives at some bygone period.
Overhead, cross-beams project through the ceiling so low as almost to
hit the head. On the front of one of these buildings was the
inscription, "God's Providence is mine Inheritance," said to have been
put there by the occupant of the house two hundred years ago, when the
plague spared this one house only in the whole city. Not improbably the
inscription has operated as a safeguard to prevent the demolition of the
house hitherto; but a shopman of an adjacent dwelling told us that it
was soon to be taken down. Here and there, about some of the streets
through which the Rows do not run, we saw houses of very aged aspect,
with steep, peaked gables. The front gable-end was supported on stone
pillars, and the sidewalk passed beneath. Most of these old houses
seemed to be taverns,--the Black Bear, the Green Dragon, and such names.
We thought of dining at one of them, but, on inspection, they looked
rather too dingy and close, and of questionable neatness. So we went to
the Royal Hotel, where we probably fared just as badly at much more
expense, and where there was a particularly gruff and crabbed old
waiter, who, I suppose, thought himself free to display his surliness
because we arrived at the hotel on foot. For my part, I love to see John
Bull show himself. I must go again and again and again to Chester, for
I suppose there is not a more curious place in the world.
EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE [Footnote: From "Lightships and Lighthouses."
Courtesy of J. B. Lippincott Co., the publishers.]
BY FREDERICK A. TALBOT.
It is doubtful whether the name of any lighthouse is so familiar
throughout the English-speaking world as the "Eddystone." Certainly no
other "pillar of fire by night, of cloud by day," can offer so romantic
a story of dogged engineering perseverance, of heartrending
disappointments, disaster, blasted hopes, and brilliant success.
Standing out in the English Channel, about sixty miles east of the
Lizard, is a straggling ridge of rocks which stretches for hundreds of
yards across the marine thoroughfare, and also obstructs the western
approach to Plymouth Harbor. But at a point some nine and a half miles
south of Rame Head on the mainland the reef rises somewhat abruptly to
the surface, so that at low-water two or three ugly granite knots are
bared, which tell only too poignantly the complete destruction they
could wreak upon a vessel which had the temerity or the ill luck to
scrape over them at high-tide. Even in the calmest weather the sea curls
and eddies viciously around these stones; hence the name "Eddystone," is
derived....
As British overseas traffic expanded, the idea of indicating the spot
for the benefit of vessels was discust. The first practical suggestion
was put forward about the year 1664, but thirty-two years elapsed before
any attempt was made to reduce theory to practise. Then an eccentric
English country gentleman, Henry Winstanley, who dabbled in mechanical
engineering upon unorthodox lines, came forward and offered to build a
lighthouse upon the terrible rocks. Those who knew this ambitious
amateur were dubious of his success, and wondered what manifestation his
eccentricity would assume on this occasion. Nor was their scepticism
entirely misplaced. Winstanley raised the most fantastic lighthouse
which has ever been known, and which would have been more at home in a
Chinese cemetery than in the English Channel. It was wrought in wood and
most lavishly embellished with carvings and gilding.
Four years were occupied in its construction, and the tower was anchored
to the rock by means of long, heavy irons. The light, merely a flicker,
flashed out from this tower in 1699, and for the first time the
proximity of the Eddystones was indicated all around the horizon by
night. Winstanley's critics were rather free in expressing their opinion
that the tower would come down with the first sou'wester, but the
eccentric builder was so intensely proud of his invention as to venture
the statement that it would resist the fiercest gale that ever blew,
and, when such did occur, he hoped that he might be in the tower at
the time.
Fate gratified his wish, for while he was on the rock in the year 1703
one of the most terrible tempests that ever have assailed the coasts of
Britain gript the structure, tore it up by the roots, and hurled it into
the Channel, where it was battered to pieces, its designer and five
keepers going down with the wreck. When the inhabitants of Plymouth,
having vainly scanned the horizon for a sign of the tower on the
following morning, put off to the rock to investigate, they found only
the bent and twisted iron rods by which the tower had been held in
position projecting mournfully into the air from the rock-face.
Shortly after the demolition of the tower, the reef, as if enraged at
having been denied a number of victims owing to the existence of the
warning light, trapt the "Winchelsea" as she was swinging up Channel,
and smashed her to atoms, with enormous loss of life.
Altho the first attempt to conquer the Eddystone had terminated so
disastrously, it was not long before another effort was made to mark the
reef. The builder this time was a Cornish laborer's son, John Rudyerd,
who had established himself in business on Ludgate Hill as a silk
mercer. In his youth he had studied civil engineering, but his friends
had small opinion of his abilities in this craft. However, he attacked
the problem boldly, and, altho his tower was a plain, business-looking
structure, it would have been impossible to conceive a design capable of
meeting the peculiar requirements of the situation more efficiently. It
"was a cone, wrought in timber, built upon a stone and wood foundation
anchored to the rock, and of great weight and strength. The top of the
cone was cut off to permit the lantern to be set in position. The result
was that externally the tower resembled the trunk of an oak tree, and
appeared to be just about as strong. It offered the minimum of
resistance to the waves, which, tumbling upon the ledge, rose and curled
around the tapering form without starting a timber.
For forty years Rudyerd's structure defied the elements, and probably
would have been standing to this day had it not possest one weak point.
It was built of wood instead of stone. Consequently, when a fire broke
out in the lantern on December 4, 1755, the flames, fanned by the
breeze, rapidly made their way downward.
No time was lost in erecting another tower on the rock, for now it was
more imperative than ever that the reef should be lighted adequately.
The third engineer was John Smeaton, who first landed on the rock to
make the surveys on April 5, 1756. He was able to stay there for only
two and a quarter hours before the rising tide drove him off, but in
that brief period he had completed the work necessary to the preparation
of his design. Wood had succumbed to the attacks of tempest and of
fire in turn.
Smeaton would use material which would defy both--Portland stone. He
also introduced a slight change in the design for such structures, and
one which has been universally copied, producing the graceful form of
lighthouse with which everyone is so familiar. Instead of causing the
sides to slope upward in the straight lines of a cone, such as Rudyerd
adopted, Smeaton preferred a slightly concave curve, so that the tower
was given a waist about half its height. He also selected the oak tree
as his guide, but one having an extensive spread of branches, wherein
will be found a shape in the trunk, so far as the broad lines are
concerned, which coincides with the form of Smeaton's lighthouse. He
chose a foundation where the rock shelved gradually to its highest
point, and dropt vertically into the water upon the opposite side. The
face of the rock was roughly trimmed to permit the foundation stones of
the tower to be laid. The base of the building was perfectly solid to
the entrance level, and each stone was dovetailed securely into
its neighbor.
From the entrance, which was about 15 feet above high water, a central
well, some five feet in diameter, containing a staircase, led to the
storeroom, nearly 30 feet above high water. Above this was a second
storeroom, a living-room as the third floor, and the bedroom beneath the
lantern. The light was placed about 72 feet above high water, and
comprised a candelabra having two rings, one smaller than and placed
within the other, but raised about a foot above its level, the two being
held firmly in position by means of chains suspended from the roof and
secured to the floor. The rings were adapted to receive twenty-four
lights, each candle weighing about two and three-quarter ounces. Even
candle manufacture was in its infancy in those days, and periodically
the keepers had to enter the lantern to snuff the wicks. In order to
keep the watchers of the lights on the alert, Smeaton installed a clock
of the grandfather pattern in the tower, and fitted it with a gong,
which struck every half hour to apprise the men of these duties. This
clock is now one of the most interesting relics in the museum at Trinity
House.... [Footnote: Trinity House, an association founded in London in
1512-1514, is "empowered by charter to examine, license and regulate
pilots, to erect beacons and lighthouses, and to place buoys in channels
and rivers."]
The lighthouse had been standing for 120 years when ominous reports were
received by the Trinity Brethren concerning the stability of the tower.
The keepers stated that during severe storms the building shook
alarmingly. A minute inspection of the structure was made, and it was
found that, altho the work of Smeaton's masons was above reproach, time
and weather had left their mark. The tower itself was becoming decrepit.
The binding cement had decayed, and the air imprisoned and comprest
within the interstices by the waves was disintegrating the structure
slowly but surely.
Under these circumstances it was decided to build a new tower on another
convenient ledge, forming part of the main reef, about 120 feet distant.
Sir James Douglass, the engineer-in-chief to Trinity House, completed
the designs and personally superintended their execution. The Smeaton
lines were taken as a basis, with one important exception. Instead of a
curve commencing at the foundation, the latter comprized a perfect
cylindrical monolith of masonry 22 feet in height by 44 feet in
diameter. From this basis the tower springs to a height which brings the
local plane 130 feet above the highest spring tides. The top of the base
is 30 inches above high water, and, the tower's diameter being less than
that of its plinth, the set-off forms an excellent landing-stage when
the weather permits.
The site selected for the Douglass tower being lower than that chosen by
Smeaton, the initial work was more exacting, as the duration of the
working period was reduced. The rock, being gneiss, was extremely tough,
and the preliminary quarrying operations for the foundation stones which
had to be sunk into the rock were tedious and difficult, especially as
the working area was limited. Each stone was dovetailed, not only to its
neighbor on either side, but below and above as well. The foundation
stones were dovetailed into the reef and were secured still further by
the aid of tow bolts, each one and a half inches in diameter, which were
passed through the stone and sunk deeply into the rock below....
The tower has eight floors, exclusive of the entrance; there are two oil
rooms, one above the other, holding 4,300 gallons of oil, above which is
a coal and store room, followed by a second storeroom. Outside the tower
at this level is a crane, by which supplies are hoisted, and which also
facilitates the landing and embarkation of the keepers, who are swung
through the air in a stirrup attached to the crane rope. Then, in turn,
come the living-room, the "low light" room, bedroom, service room, and
finally the lantern. For the erection of the tower, 2,171 blocks of
granite, which were previously fitted temporarily in their respective
positions on shore and none of which weighed less than two tons, were
used. When the work was commenced, the engineer estimated that the task
would occupy five years, but on May 18, 1882, the lamp was lighted by
the Duke of Edinburgh, the Master of Trinity House at the time, the
enterprise having occupied only four years. Some idea may thus be
obtained of the energy with which the labor was prest forward, once the
most trying sections were overcome....
When the new tower was completed and brought into service, the Smeaton
building was demolished. This task was carried out with extreme care,
inasmuch as the citizens of Plymouth had requested that the historic
Eddystone structure might be erected on Plymouth Hoe, on the spot
occupied by the existing Trinity House landmark. The authorities agreed
to this proposal, and the ownership of the Smeaton tower was forthwith
transferred to the people of Plymouth. But demolition was carried out
only to the level of Smeaton's lower storeroom. The staircase, well, and
entrance were filled up with masonry, the top was beveled off, and in
the center of the stump an iron pole was planted. While the Plymouth Hoe
relic is but one-half of the tower, its reerection was completed
faithfully, and, moreover, carries the original candelabra which the
famous engineer devised.
Not only is the Douglass tower a beautiful example of lighthouse
engineering, but it was relatively cheap. The engineer, when he prepared
the designs, estimated that an outlay of L78,000, or $390,000, would be
incurred. As a matter of fact, the building cost only L59,255, or
$296,275, and a saving of L18,000, or $90,000, in a work of this
magnitude is no mean achievement. All things considered, the Eddystone
is one of the cheapest sea-rock lights which has ever been consummated.
THE CAPITAL OF THE BRITISH, SAXON AND NORMAN KINGS [Footnote: From
"Visits to Remarkable Places."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT
What an interesting old city is Winchester! and how few people are aware
of it! The ancient capital of the kingdom--the capital of the British,
and the Saxon, and the Norman kings--the favorite resort of our kings
and queens, even till the revolution of 1688; the capital which, for
ages, maintained a proud, and long a triumphant, rivalry with London
itself; the capital which once boasted upward of ninety churches and
chapels, whose meanest houses now stand upon the foundations of noble
palaces and magnificent monasteries; and in whose ruins or in whose yet
superb minster lie enshrined the bones of mighty kings, and fair and
pious queens; of lordly abbots and prelates, who in their day swayed not
merely the destinies of this one city, but of the kingdom. There she
sits--a sad, discrowned queen, and how few are acquainted with her in
the solitude of her desertion! Yet where is the place, saving London
itself, which can compete with her in solemn and deep interest? Where is
the city, except that, in Great Britain, which can show so many objects
of antique beauty, or call up so many national recollections?
Here lie the bones of Alfred--here he was probably born, for this was at
that time the court and the residence of his parents. Here, at all
events, he spent his infancy and the greater portion of his youth. Here
he imbibed the wisdom and the magnanimity of mind with which he
afterward laid the foundations of our monarchy, our laws, liberties and
literature, and in a word, of our national greatness.
Hence Alfred went forth to fight those battles which freed his country
from the savage Dane; and, having done more for his realm and race than
ever monarch did before or since, here he lay down, in the strength of
his years, and consigned his tomb as a place of grateful veneration to a
people whose future greatness even his sagacious spirit could not be
prophetic enough to foresee.
Were it only for the memory and tomb of this great king, Winchester
ought to be visited by every Englishman with the most profound
veneration and affection; but here also lie the ashes of nearly all
Alfred's family and kin: his father Ethelwolf, who saw the virtues and
talents, and prognosticated the greatness of his son; his noble-minded
mother, who breathed into his infant heart the most sublime sentiments;
his royal brothers, and his sons and daughters. Here also repose Canute,
who gave that immortal reproof on the Southampton shore to his
sycophantic courtiers, and his celebrated queen Emma, so famous at once
for her beauty and her trials. Here is still seen the tomb of Rufus, who
was brought hither in a charcoal-burner's cart from the New Forest,
where the chance arrow of Tyrrel, avenged, in his last hunt, the
cruelties of himself and his father on that ground....
Historians claim a high antiquity for Winchester as the Caer Gwent of
the Celtic and Belgic Britons, the Venta Belgarum of the Romans, and the
Wintanceaster of the Saxons. The history of Winchester is nearly coeval
with the Christian era. Julius Caesar does not seem to have been here,
in his invasion of Britain, but some of his troops must have passed
through it; a plate from one of his standards, bearing his name and
profile, having been found deep buried in a sand bed in this
neighborhood; and here, within the first half century of Christendom,
figured the brave descendants of Cassivelaunus, those noble sons of
Cunobelin or Cymbeline, Guiderius and Arviragus, whom Shakespeare has so
beautifully presented to us in his "Cymbeline." ...
Here it was that, while Caractacus himself reigned, the fate of the
brave Queen Boadicea was sealed. Stung to the quick with the insults she
had received from the Romans, this noble queen of the Iceni, the Bonduca
of some writers, and the Boo Tika of her own coins, had sworn to root
out the Roman power from this country. Had she succeeded, Caractacus
himself had probably fallen, nor had there ever been a king Lucius here.
She came, breathing utter extermination to every thing Roman or of Roman
alliance, at the head of 230,000 barbarians, the most numerous army then
ever collected by any British prince. Already had she visited and laid
in ashes Camulodunum, London, and Verulam, killing every Roman and every
Roman ally to the amount of 70,000 souls. But in this neighborhood she
was met by the Roman general Paulinus, and her army routed, with the
slaughter of 80,000 of her followers. In her despair at this
catastrophe, she destroyed herself, and instead of entering the city in
triumph was brought in, a breathless corpse, for burial.
Henry III. was born here, and always bore the name of Henry of
Winchester; Henry IV. here married Joan of Brittany; Henry VI. came
often hither, his first visit being to study the discipline of Wykeham's
College as a model for his new one at Eton, to supply students to King's
College, Cambridge, as Wykeham's does to his foundation of New College,
Oxford; and happy had it been for this unfortunate monarch had he been a
simple monk in one of the monasteries of a city which he so loved,
enjoying peace, learning and piety, having bitterly to learn:
"That all the rest is held at such a rate
As brings a thousand-fold more care to keep
Than in possession any jot of pleasure."
Henry VIII. made a visit with the Emperor Charles V., and stayed a week
examining its various antiquities and religious institutions; but he
afterward visited them in a more sweeping manner by the suppression of
its monasteries, chantries, etc., so that, says Milner, "these being
dissolved, and the edifices themselves soon after pulled down, or
falling to decay, it must have worn the appearance of a city sacked by a
hostile army." Through his reign and that of Edward VI., the destruction
of the religious houses, and the stripping of the churches, went on to a
degree which must have rendered Winchester an object of ghastly change
and desolation.
"Then," says Milner, "were the precious and curious monuments of piety
and antiquity, the presents of Egbert and Ethelwolph, Canute, and Emma,
unrelentingly rifled and east into the melting-pot for the mere value of
the metal which composed them. Then were the golden tabernacles and
images of the Apostles snatched from the cathedral and other altars,"
and not a few of the less valuable sort of these sacred implements were
to be seen when he wrote (1798), and probably are now, in many private
houses of this city and neighborhood.
The later history of this fine old city is chiefly that of melancholy
and havoc. A royal marriage should be a gay thing; but the marriage of
Bloody Mary here to Philip of Spain awakes no great delight in an
English heart. Here, through her reign and that of Elizabeth, the chief
events were persecutions for religion. James I. made Winchester the
scene of the disgraceful trials of Sir Walter Raleigh, Lords Cobham and
Grey, and their assumed accomplices--trials in which that most vain and
pedantic of tyrants attempted, on the ground of pretended conspiracies,
to wreak his personal spite on some of the best spirits of England.
VI
SCOTLAND
EDINBURGH [Footnote: From "Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh."]
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Venice, it has been said, differs from all other cities in the sentiment
which she inspires. The rest may have admirers; she only, a famous fair
one, counts lovers in her train. And, indeed, even by her kindest
friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a similar sense. These like her
for many reasons, not any one of which is satisfactory in itself. They
like her whimsically, if you will, and somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon
his cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest meaning of the
term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as interesting.
She is preeminently Gothic, and all the more so since she has set
herself off with some Greek airs, and erected classic temples on her
crags. In a word, and above all, she is a curiosity.
The palace of Holyrood has been left aside--in the growth of Edinburgh,
and stands gray and silent in a workman's quarter and among breweries
and gas-works. It is a house of many memories. Great people of yore,
kings and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors, played their stately
farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has
lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers. There
Prince Charlie held his fantom levees, and in a very gallant manner
represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all these things of
clay are mingled with the dust, the king's crown itself is shown for
sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone palace has outlived these changes.
For fifty weeks together, it is no more than a show for tourists and a
museum of old furniture; but on the fifty-first, behold the palace
reawakened and mimicking its past.
The Lord Commissioner, a kind of stage sovereign, sits among stage
courtiers; a coach and six and clattering escort come and go before the
gate; at night, the windows are lighted up, and its near neighbors, the
workmen, may dance in their own houses to the palace music. And in this
the palace is typical. There is a spark among the embers; from time to
time the old volcano smokes. Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and
still wears, in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and
half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has
long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the
Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. There are
armed men and cannon in the citadel overhead; you may see the troops
marshaled on the high parade; and at night after the early winter
even-fall, and in the morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind
carries abroad over Edinburgh the sound of drums and bugles. Grave
judges sit bewigged in what was once the scene of imperial
deliberations. Close by, in the High Street perhaps, the trumpets may
sound about the stroke of noon; and you see a troop of citizens in
tawdry masquerade; tabard above, heather-mixture trouser below, and the
men themselves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic bystanders. The
grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets with a better
presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of Scotland, who
are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom before two score
boys, and thieves, and hackney coachmen.
Meanwhile, every hour the bell of the University rings out over the hum
of the streets, and every hour a double tide of students, coming and
going, fills the deep archways. And, lastly, one night in the
springtime--or, say, one morning rather, at the peep of day--late folk
may hear the voices of many men singing a psalm in unison from a church
on one side of the Old High Street; and a little after, or perhaps a
little before, the sound of many men singing a psalm in unison from
another church on the opposite side of the way. There will be something
in the words about the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it is to see
brethren dwelling together in unity. And the late folk will tell
themselves that all this singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly
ecclesiastical parliaments--the parliaments of churches, which are
brothers in many admirable virtues, but not specially like brothers in
this particular of a tolerant and peaceful life.
Again, meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy
between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few
places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye.
In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature--a
Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden shaken by passing trains,
carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its warlike
shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the New Town.
From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon
the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning
themselves along Prince's Street, with its mile of commercial palaces
all beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley
set with statues, where the washings of the Old Town flutter in the
breeze at its high windows.
And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of architecture! In this one
valley, where the life of the town goes most busily forward, there may
be seen, shown one above and behind another by the accidents of the
ground, buildings in almost every style upon the globe. Egyptian and
Greek temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires, are huddled one over
another in a most admired disorder; while, above all, the brute mass of
the Castle and the summit of Arthur's Seat look down upon these
imitations with a becoming dignity, as the works of Nature may look down
upon the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more indiscriminate patroness
than we imagine, and in no way frightened of a strong effect. The birds
roost as willingly among the Corinthian capitals as in the crannies of
the crag; the same atmosphere and daylight clothe the eternal rock and
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